Paul's thoughts
World Cup SEO – When To Start An SEO Campaign
Whether you like it or not, the World Cup is now in full swing and will engulf everything from TV adverts to newspaper headlines for the next month throughout the world. On the back of all of this interest, search engine queries for surrounding terms will inevitably increase exponentially over this period, providing a goldmine of traffic that anyone optimising a related website for, would donate their England vs. Germany World Cup final match ticket to get a piece of… But now it’s too late for World Cup SEO this year; so when exactly should you begin to optimise a website to maximise your gain on these one-off traffic driving events?
Well, it all depends on when exactly the search volumes hit the critical point whereby it will become profitable to have an optimised site to attract this increased traffic. For this data, we’ll turn to Google Insights.
Let’s take a look at the term ‘World Cup 2010’:
The trend shows that pick-up began tentatively in March then really took off throughout April. However this is a term that you would be very unlikely to be competing for directly, so let’s imagine your website delivered breaking news on the World Cup and you were optimising for the keyword ‘World Cup News’:
The trend here is slightly different with pick-up growing steadily throughout April followed by 2 spikes; presumably when the World Cup teams were announced in May and as the World Cup kicked off in June.
Alternatively, you may run a betting website that is looking at cashing in on the millions of people on the hunt for the best odds on how many times Emile Heskey will miss an open net or when Robert Green will next let a ball trickle past him. In this case you may be looking at implementing SEO for ‘World Cup Odds’:
I think you can probably see a pattern forming here.
So with this in mind, and the fact that these terms are extremely competitive, you should have been looking at starting your Would Cup SEO sometime way back in November 2009 to allow for it to mature in time to capitalise on the period when the growth in search traffic began. By the time your target market is thinking about searching on these keywords, the moment has long passed for optimisation. You need to be one step ahead of the game and (if you excuse the pun) always keep your eye on the ball!
With this said, I’d pencil in December 2011 for some serious SEO work for the London Olympics, or in the shorter term, how’s about getting on with some cricket related SEO for the next Ashes series in November 2010!
Great article Paul. Can you give a real world example of how a business could potentially cash in by using this type of search strategy?
Hi Chris,
With vast amounts of traffic come a multitude of uses, both good and bad.
Take this year’s general election for example. Some internet rouges ambushed many related keywords and optimised their related landing pages for them. When a user landed on the page they were informed their PC was infected with a virus and prompted to download a fake antivirus program (see http://bit.ly/d4oZzh).
However there are of course much more legitimate reasons to capitalise on this traffic, the reasons for which will depend on the topic of your website.
Back to the example of the World Cup; If your site deals with travel arrangements or foreign accommodation, there is a direct incentive to get it optimised for keywords surrounding ‘Would Cup accommodation’ or ‘Hotels in South Africa’ and you will see a direct financial benefit. The same would go for gambling sites and online sports stores.
A great example would be the World Cup Widget from PaddyPower (see http://bit.ly/9Wr5ET). Their obvious incentive to rank well for related World Cup terms is to benefit from punters betting on the games. To aid them in this they developed a World Cup widget that streams real-time news, odds and fixtures to a customisable interface and allows people to embed this directly on their website. Within the widget are a series of optimised back-links pointing to the PaddyPower website that are randomly assigned to each new widget. The anchor texts include ‘Football Betting’ and ‘World Cup 2010 Odds’ which see them ranking 9th and 7th respectively; so it looks like it’s doing its job!
However there are many sites that do not deal directly with football or World Cup related subjects, but could still benefit. These sites may be blogs, news resources, general interest sites or, to be honest, pretty much anything! Offering a resource to users such as a downloadable wall chart, a World Cup related game or anything else that could possibly entertain or is of use. This resource will then benefit the site in two ways;
1. The increased traffic will introduce your website to people that may never have visited it before. If you offer on-page advertising this may generate extra income this way or, if your site offers other products or information to the visitors, they may make a purchase or bookmark your site for future reference.
2. With great viral content will come a great influx of valuable back-links. This link juice will then permeate through your site and increase the authority of the overall domain. This boost will have knock-on effects to your main SEO campaign and (hopefully) see a boost in rankings!
Paul
It depends what industry you are in but I would even look at starting earlier if you have the resources to do so.
If you take the London 2012 Olympics as an example, there will always be a constant stream of news and information to use to create your Olympic area now. If you are a news / information website then you could already have everything set up. the BBC is an example of someone who has already done this http://bit.ly/cBI9KJ
If you have an e-commerce website then i would create the Olympic front page / URL Structure and put a blog on it for now as merchandise and the items you will sell will not be available yet.
The blog can then have great content adding to it and it can age nicely until closer to the time.
Make sure that these areas are linked to so Google can spider them but they dont need to be linked to from the homepage yet, and then when you have your product to sell, simply move the homepage of the blog and put your Olympic store from there. When you know the traffic is about to set off then link the Olympic section prominently from your homepage.
Oh absolutely. Totally agree Gary. The earlier the better. The time period I offered was a sort of common average for a 1st page positioning. Obviously ranking for the phrase “World Cup” will take exponentially more time than say “World Cup Football Betting Shops in Bognor Regis”. However…
The time needed to optimise and achieve good visibility is all dependant on the size of the event in question, the number of online competitors you have and the choice of keywords that you are targeting.
Regarding starting earlier on the highlighted World Cup examples in this post; I don’t believe starting much earlier would have been that beneficial. The cost for a website to undertake SEO earlier would have seen their site peek too soon. If the site hit a 1st page listing before the observed increase in traffic levels, their optimisation will be ultimately loosing them money. This brings another factor into the equation; what is the product you are selling, and ultimately what is your profit on each sale. This will then determine whether peaking too soon will be financially viable or not.
(Size of the Event + Keywords + Competition + Profit Margin per Sale) / Peak in Search Traffic
= Perfectly timed SEO campaign!